Call to spread Hamza Alavi’s message of social justice

Karachi
Pakistan lost its importance for the US after the end of the Cold War. Besides, as years went by, the writ of the state began to erode with the result that there was total chaos as regards our statehood. Then came another factor and that was the Afghan Jihad which brought about further degeneration.
This assertion was made by Dr Jaffer Ahmed while speaking at a lecture-cum-panel discussion to mark the 94th birth anniversary of the late internationally renowned Marxist thinker Hamza Alavi on Saturday evening.
He said Hamza Alavi’s name was right at the top of the list of the country’s scholars and social scientists.
Ahmed remarked that it was after this involvement of Pakistan in the Afghan Jihad that corruption rapidly permeated the ranks of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy may have been corrupt in the 1950s and the 60s but there was no trend towards corruption for purely personal gains or to reap a personal bonanza.
“Democracy which we terribly lack today is indispensable to social justice,” he asserted.
As the speeches pivoted around the class system and the role of the peasants and the propertied classes, Dr Asad Saeed said that funds which poured into Pakistan from abroad for the welfare of the masses didn’t find their way into the channels they were meant for but went into the pockets of the propertied classes.
Ahmed said the state intervened on behalf of the capitalists. He also referred to the “overdeveloped” state vis-a-vis the dominant classes. He also cited the articles by Alavi highlighting the subtle destructive role of the World Bank and the IMF in the context of developing countries.
Dr Zafar Shaheed, a former ILO labour expert who studied under Hamza Alvi at the University of Leeds in the UK, said: “What we need to do is to bring about a socialist movement in our country to bring about peace.”
Eulogising Alavi, he said he continued with his noble endeavour despite his failing health. Alavi’s activism focused against racism and recalled his meetings with the late Martin Luther King and the late Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Shaheed said that he even came all the way from the UK to live in Sahiwal just to study the peasantry system and the travails the peasants were subjected to by the feudal and the capitalist classes. He said Alavi wrote in detail on the Baradari system.
He quoted Alavi’s 1961 study “Imperialism and colonial capitalism” and discussed the mode of production under colonial capitalism. He quoted Alavi as saying, “Under colonialism, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) are interested in taking away the social aspects of the state.”
Others who participated in the discussion were Dr Asad Saeed and Dr Fahad Ali.
Talking about the Hamza Alavi Foundation, Zain Alavi, brother of the late thinker, said that the mission of the foundation was to spread the message of egalitarianism and social justice among the masses, especially the youth. He said that Alavi was part of the curricula in European and American universities.